Barbara Davenport said she was among those who cut the ribbon on the Pontiac Silverdome when it opened in 1975.
Taxpayers paid more than $55.7 million to build it. Never did Davenport imagine it would sell for $583,000, or less than the median salary of a Detroit Lions player.
"When I read that in the paper, that hurt," the 75-year-old community activist said. "We could have made a lot more money if we had torn it down….for scrap."
Pontiac, the great Ottawa chief, is history.
Pontiac, the automobile, will soon be history, too, as General Motors Co. discontinues the line.
Pontiac, the Detroit satellite city, is facing 35% unemployment, a $6 million budget deficit, and a $103 million debt load. It needs to get the empty Silverdome's $1.5 million annual operating costs off its books and onto the books of someone who also can pay taxes.
Davenport, who campaigned for Barack Obama, wonders how it all became so desperate. She moved to Pontiac from Port Arthur, Texas, when she was 10. Her father found steady work in the auto industry.
She grew up to become an anesthesia technician at a local hospital and was part of a civic group invited to participate in the Silverdome's opening ceremony.
"That was a wonderful day in my life," she said. "When we looked up in the sky, there was a white helicopter landing. And there was Johnny Mathis .. and he sang the national anthem."
Elvis performed at the Silverdome on New Year's Eve, 1975. Led Zeppelin rocked 76,229 fans in 1977. The Detroit Pistons played from 1978 to 1988. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in 1987 with 93,682, a crowd not even topped that year by WrestleMania III's 93,173, who came to see Hulk Hogan battle Andre the Giant.
The Silverdome tarnished into a venue for monster truck rallies and even a parking lot for drive-in movies after 2002. That's when the Detroit Lions moved to Ford Field.
"They left us," Davenport said. "And they're not playing any better."
The city put the Silverdome and its 27 acres up for auction after several failed attempts to sell it. The highest bidder was Andreas Apostolopoulos, CEO of Toronto-based Triple Properties Inc.
"You buy when it's at the bottom," Apostolopoulos said when I reached him by telephone on Monday. "Right now, I don't think you can go any lower than that."
Apostolopoulos, who won the auction last week, said he is more concerned with the Silverdome's annual maintenance costs, which are almost three times the price.
I can relate to the risk he's taking, at least on a smaller scale. When I was visiting Detroit last year, a real-estate broker offered to give me a house that he had listed for $1. Not sell. Give. But, silly me, I didn't want to deal with the costs of carrying an abandoned home in a vacated neighborhood.
Pontiac, along with rest of the Detroit metropolitan area, has long been declining with the U.S. auto industry. And Apostolopoulos is clearly the best game in town.
H. Wallace Parker, an attorney in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., had sued to block the sale to Apostolopoulos, claiming he had a deal to buy the venue for nearly $17 million. City officials said he never put down money and that his contract expired. On Monday, a Michigan judge lifted a temporary restraining order, allowing the sale to go through.
Some media reports have indicated that Apostolopoulos wants to use the Silverdome for soccer games, but the developer told me that's just one of his ideas.
"There are all kinds of different ideas," he said. "We're going to ask the people in the area what they would like to see. Nothing is sure yet."
Here's an idea: How about new reality TV show? "Flip This Superdome."
"I think he's going to sell it," Davenport said. "He can get $15 million to $20 million for that stadium."
The City of Pontiac hopes to net a meager $420,000 from the sale after expenses.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of all the tax dollars the city spent over the years may turn out to be an entrepreneur who was born in Greece and runs a real-estate company in Canada.
Reminds me of old Chief Pontiac, who rebelled against the British just so other white settlers could take his ancestral lands.
"I didn't think about this when we, the taxpayers, built it in Pontiac," Davenport said. "Back then, we had General Motors. Everybody was working."
The Silverdome brought happy times and enormous crowds to the city for decades, generating business and tax revenue it might have never had. But Davenport said it doesn't feel like such a great deal today.
"The way they left us with the stadium .. as I look at it now ... I don't think the citizens should do it again."
(Al's Emporium, written by Dow Jones Newswires columnist Al Lewis, offers commentary and analysis on a wide range of business subjects through an unconventional perspective. The column is published each Tuesday and Thursday at 9 a.m. ET. Contact Al at al.lewis@dowjones.com or tellittoal.com)
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